There was a time when building your own satellite and having it placed into orbit would have been a wild dream. Now it is extremely possible, but still not trivial. A CubeSat is a very small satellite that can hitch a ride with a bigger satellite or get tossed out of a friendly space station. This week’s issue of The Orbital Index has a very good overview of what all is required. It also contains a great selection of links to get more information.
At first glance, it seems like it would be pretty simple. A computer, a battery, and some solar cells. Well, you probably want to hear back from it, so then you need a radio. Oh, and an antenna. But the antenna can’t stick out during launch so you need a way to deploy it. If you want the satellite to point somewhere, you’ll need things for that, too. Some CubeSats even have tiny thrusters to affect their orbit.
We found it interesting that about 1,000 CubeSats have been launched as of early this year. Only about 100 have failed to deploy successfully and most of those were destroyed in launch failures. Who builds these? Before 2013, most CubeSats were built by schools. Today, the majority originate with commercial or amateur entities.
There’s even a searchable database of small satellites available. You’ll see that CubeSats use a U designator to indicate their size. Each U is a cube measuring 100mm — about 4 inches — on a side. So a 2U satellite would be the same size as two 1U satellites next to each other.
We’ve looked at tiny satellites in the past. You can even track them without too much effort.
Image Credit: NASA Ames Research Center
Well curated article! It’s hard to convey all the nuances associated with building a system like a cubesat (1st time builders still hover at ~25% success rate). Check out my SmallSat 2019 paper describing my open-source hardware+software approach to avoiding common pitfalls. The intent is to handle all the routine stuff so folks can move on to doing more science.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/smallsat/2019/all2019/65/
And yet, a “wild dream” was when Don Stoner showed a circuit for a transistor transmitter, and as an aside said “anyone got a spare rocket?” .
OSCAR 1 went up in December of 1961, just transmitting a beacon and some rudimentary telemetry. Just four years after Sputnik.
It was the first non-government satellite, and I think preceeded any commercial satellite.
It showed the viability of using one rocket to launch multiple satellites. Previously, the few satellites in orbit had each required a rocket per satellite.
That came so early in the space age that it was almost there from the start. It wasn’t a common thing, only 6 ham satellites by the fal of 1972, but it erased the notion of a “pipe dream”.
I suppose some other satellite might have done it first if it hadn’t been OSCAR 1, but OSCAR was first. It showed the viability , and paved the way for all the small non-government and non-commercial satellites that followef.
Yiucan’t really say Cubesat withkut the ham satellites. Most seem to use tge ham bands for radio.
Michael
The Orbital Index is great, good to see them getting some wider attention. Anyone who’s interested in keeping up with everything happening in space tech right now should subscribe.